


in which a half-confession breaks them both

by sapphic_luthor



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Lena Luthor Finds Out Kara Danvers is Supergirl, and it goes spectacularly badly, but uhhh. this one's not happy yall, fluff-adjacent for a minute there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:53:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22655050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphic_luthor/pseuds/sapphic_luthor
Summary: They keep telling her, Nia and Kelly and Alex, that Lena just needs space. That she’ll come around, that she’ll forgive Kara eventually, that the shock of the reveal will pass and they’ll find their way back to the place they were in before. Kara smiles, nods, tells them they’re right, but when she recalls hands grasped tight under blankets during movies and nights with their legs accidentally tangled beneath Lena’s sheets, a cold panic rises in her chest and she cannot swallow the terror that she’s shattered the purest thing she’s ever known.
Relationships: Kara Danvers & Lena Luthor, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 38
Kudos: 368





	in which a half-confession breaks them both

**Author's Note:**

> yes i _did_ listen to 'contaminated' by banks 800 times in a row while writing this and no i am _not_ okay why do you ask

There is something softer between them, now. Kara doesn’t know when it started— she doesn’t know if it ever really _started_ , or if maybe it had always been there and she had been too blind to see it.

Things were the same, and then they weren’t. Lunch dates turned into something heavier: Lena fights to contain her smiles less often, her gazes are more direct. She was last to leave, once, after game night, and then suddenly she is the last to leave every week, and somewhere along the line Kara began looking forward to the ‘after’ more than the ‘during'. There is beauty in the nights spent surrounded by the people she loves: Alex, laughing into Kelly’s neck after one too many drinks; Brainy, eyebrows furrowed in genuine confusion as to how he could possibly be losing at the game of Life when he’s _technically_ lived longer than nearly all of them combined. But then there is a tenderness in what follows that leaves Kara breathless on more than one occasion: Lena, legs curled beneath her on the couch, a glass of wine cradled in one hand and crooked smirk on her face as she lifts the blanket and beckons for the blonde to join her. The barely-there touch of Lena’s knee against Kara’s own. The way Lena’s eyes soften, how her voice goes gentle when they’re alone. Kara thinks back to the first night Lena had stayed over, and it wasn’t on purpose— not really— but in retrospect, nothing between them has ever really felt like an accident.

_Lena was warm-drunk and sleepy and sprawled across her couch, laughing about something, or about nothing, and Kara had lost herself in the moment and blurted, “stay with me tonight,” and it had stopped them both short._

_“Sorry?” Lena asked, looking amused._

_“Just— here, I mean. Stay here. It’s late, and there’s no way you’ll find a cab for at least another hour, so…” Kara trailed off as Lena turned and craned her neck to peer out of the window from her position on the couch, like she was sizing up the possibility of a trip home._

_“You know I’m only a twenty minute walk away, right?”_

_“Okay, but it’s_ nighttime _, Lena. You can’t walk alone,” Kara protested. “I know it’s close. I can literally see your apartment from here,” she added with a grumble._

_“Kara, if you wanted me to spend the night, you didn’t have to get me drunk first, you just had to ask.” Lena punctuated the statement with a comical wiggle of her eyebrows, laughing openly as her friend blushed bright red. Kara had only a fraction of a second to pointedly ignore the way her heart missed a beat when suddenly the moment was gone and Lena jumped forward to the next thought: “Wait. Can you really see my apartment from here?”_

_“Uh, Lena,” Kara responded, finding her footing and silently thanking a higher power for the subject change. “You literally live in the top-floor penthouse apartment of one of the tallest buildings in National City.” She stood from her place on the couch and stepped over to the window to point toward a particularly tall skyscraper in the distance, tapping the glass for emphasis. “You have wrap-around windows._ Everyone _can see your apartment.”_

_Lena looked from the window to Kara, searching the blonde’s face. Another smirk threatened to break onto her features as she asked, “So do you watch me often, Kara?”_

_Kara caught the joke and fought a returning smile, cocking her head, and giving Lena a pointed look before deadpanning, “Yes, constantly. I sit in my apartment and stare longingly out the window, day in and day out, waiting for the moment your lights turn on.”_

_Lena laughed out loud at that, full and bright and happy, and the sound plucked so gently at one of Kara’s heartstrings that she felt her eyes fill with sudden and unexpected tears. She turned away from Lena, grabbing at the remaining empty glasses on the coffee table and hurrying toward the kitchen to hide her vulnerability when Lena spoke up again through the tail end of her giggles._

_“I really would love to stay here tonight though, if that’s okay?”_

_“Of course!” Kara replied, nervous energy making her voice just a touch too loud. She swallowed hard, blinking the mist in her eyes away, and said, “You’re always welcome.”_

_“Same to you,” Lena replied, yawning and oblivious to the thread of unease in Kara’s voice. “If, in your constant vigilance of my apartment, you see that the light is on, always feel free to stop by.” Her tone was teasing, but she paused long enough that Kara had to look up from her place in the kitchen and meet the brunette’s eyes before Lena spoke again. “I mean it. I always want to see you.” Kara felt the room go still and then re-awaken within the span of a second. Something burned bright between them, and she wasn’t sure if she was ready to acknowledge it._

_“Okay,” she smiled back. She grinned, injecting a levity to the moment that allowed her to bow out of whatever was clearly growing between them, at least for the night. “I’ll hold you to that.”_

-

**Kara:** Dinner in 30?

Three minutes pass with no answer.

**Kara:** I know you’re hooooome

She takes a quick photo of the skyline from her window, and uses her finger to draw a haphazard circle around the lit top floor of Lena’s high-rise. She attaches it to the message with the set of eyes emoji before she hits send. The response comes seconds later.

**Lena:** Honestly not in the mood to leave the house

 **Lena:** Come over instead?

Lena has just stepped out of the shower when she opens the door. Kara clutches just a bit too hard at the takeout bags in her hand and tries hard not to let her mind linger on the flush of Lena’s cheeks from hot water, or the way Lena’s hair curls against her neck when it’s damp. The CEO is in jeans and a hoodie that she very likely stole from Kara’s apartment weeks ago, and she looks comfortable and vulnerable and _soft,_ and that post-game-night-with-Lena-laughing-on-her-couch feeling hits Kara square in the chest and leaves her blinking dumbly in the doorway long after Lena invites her in.

They’re halfway through the pad Thai order that Lena loves when Kara blurts out the question that’s been sneaking around the front of her brain for the last 30 minutes.

“Uh, it’s not weird that I actually checked your apartment from my window, right?”

“No,” Lena chuckles, and Kara realizes that pretty soon she’s going to have to acknowledge the way her heart swells at the sound of her laughter. “I told you to. I know I was several glasses of wine deep, but I wasn’t kidding,” her voice gets softer. “I’m always happy to see you, Kara. I always want you here.” She shrugs as she says it, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and when she looks up from her takeout container and their eyes lock, something ripples between them.

“Okay,” Kara replies. “Well then, I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d hold you to it.”

-

She’s at Lena’s almost 5 nights a week, after that. The glare of Lena’s apartment isn’t even really _that_ visible from Kara’s window unless the light of the city is just right, but Lena doesn’t need to know that. She doesn’t need to know that if Kara listens closely, she can hear the lock of Lena’s door engage, or that Kara knows the sound of Lena kicking her heels off onto the hardwood of her floor like she knows the sound of her own voice. It takes a while for Kara to be comfortable showing up to Lena’s unannounced, but once she does, trips to Lena’s penthouse feel less like going to visit a friend and more like coming home. 

First it’s just for dinner, and then it’s just for a glass (or two) of wine after dinner, and then it’s “ keep me company while I finish these reports for work,” which turns into “I’m here to mope around your apartment while I try to write this article for Snapper” and by the time Kara notices that she spends more time at Lena’s home than her own, it’s too late to really consider the implications of it, so she just rolls with the punches and ignores the feeling that she’s missing something big.

They’re three weeks into this— this _something_ that Kara still doesn’t know how to explain to herself— when she finally admits that she can’t keep up the charade any longer. Each day, Supergirl flies the skies, fistfights the worst of National City, of Earth, of _other_ Earths, and each night she stumbles home beaten and bruised and aching. And then she goes to see Lena, and Lena smiles at her like she’s the center of the universe. Lena puts her hand against Kara’s back when she passes behind her in the kitchen, and Lena laughs more now than she ever has before and that feels like it _means_ something. Kara knows that she has to tell her, because there’s another thing— a more terrifying thing, a confession with the weight to break them both— living deep in Kara’s bones. If she doesn’t tell Lena that she’s Supergirl, this real and formidable and explosive thing might come tumbling from her mouth in a moment of tenderness; like when Lena’s half-asleep with her head resting on Kara’s shoulder while they watch documentaries, like when Lena calls ahead to their go-to takeout restaurant and requests they double the order of potstickers, like the first time Lena insists that Kara share her bed and Kara wakes up with Lena’s leg hooked around her own and soft breaths against her collarbone.

She has to tell her.

She waits for the perfect moment, and it never comes.

-

It’s their last night together, but Kara doesn’t know it yet. 

She stares across the couch at Lena’s profile, backlit in blue from the glow of a laptop, and tries to imagine a time before she was in love with her.

She comes up empty.

-

In the morning, Supergirl nearly dies. 

While she sits on the back of an armored vehicle and allows Alex’s agents to patch up her injuries, the hero considers what might have happened if she hadn’t won this fight by the skin of her teeth.

She thinks of successful Kryptonite weapons and flatlining in the DEO. How Catco would break the story; Lena seeing the news and picking her phone up to call Kara. She thinks of Lena listening to the phone ring and ring and ring, not knowing that Kara Danvers and Kara Zor-El shared the same lifeline cut short by fate.

She thinks of Lena standing alone at a funeral that she doesn’t fully understand, pushing back tears for the city’s hero and wondering why her best friend didn’t show up, why Alex Danvers was entirely inconsolable, why the look in J’onn’s eyes makes her feel like a widow. 

She thinks of how Lena would eventually be told, and how betrayal would twist itself into every seam of the agony of loss. How Lena would be forced to live that pain twice. Kara thinks of Lena, broken and alone, and she knows she can’t wait another day.

She crashlands onto the marble of Lena’s balcony, remnants of Kryptonite from the fight still coursing through her veins. She’s shaken and weak, and the only thing she can think of is the whisper of an almost-death in her ear and the abject horror that she might die before Lena truly knows her. 

“I had to see you,” Supergirl says, skipping introduction, and it hits Lena in a tone so unusually earnest and unfamiliar for the two of them that the brunette barely has time to register that the Kryptonian is _in her home_ before Supergirl speaks again. “I… I almost died today.”

“What? Are you okay? You— why did you come _here_?” Lena’s startled response is sharp, a knee-jerk reaction borne of concern and unpreparedness in the face of a conversation that suddenly feels momentous. Kara thinks of game night sleepovers and Lena’s uninhibited laughter, of the ghost of a misplaced kiss on the cheek pressed to the corner of her lips once when they were both nearly asleep. She thinks of Lena, of Lena, of Lena, and then she opens her mouth and damns herself.

“I needed to see you, and… you said any time your light was on.”

Green eyes grow wide, and then, just like that, Lena knows.

-

Kara doesn’t see her for six and a half weeks.

Lena has ignored every text, every call, every invitation. Three times Kara tries to bring Lena lunch, and three times she is firmly intercepted by Jess: _Ms. Luthor is in a meeting,_ she says, _she’s unavailable for the forseeable future._ After the last attempt, when Kara finally submits and steps into the elevator to exit, she pulls her glasses onto her nose and chances a glance through the floors of the L-Corp building toward where she knows the sleek white CEO’s desk to be. Her best friend sits with her elbows planted on her desk and her head in her hands; Lena’s eyes are closed, but Kara knows the posture of pain when she sees it.

She doesn’t try to contact Lena after that, and the loss aches full and weary in her bones. She writes articles, she meets (and misses) Snapper’s deadlines, she fights muggers and traffickers and extraterrestrials, but there is some fundamental part of Kara’s life that has fragmented and fallen away, and she feels the space it leaves behind acutely. She sees her friends and her family, and she spends more nights than she used to at Al’s. For six Fridays in a row, she hosts game night, and then she cleans up alone. She keeps her curtains closed.

Lena’s lights haven’t been on— not _really_ on— since the night Kara told her. Kara tries not to check, but every late night walk to a corner shop or bullet-quick flyby during patrol finds Kara’s eyes pulled toward Lena’s apartment building, and the golden glow that whispered _I always want you here_ has been conspicuously absent from the top floor.

They keep telling her, Nia and Kelly and Alex, that Lena just needs space. That she’ll come around, that she’ll forgive Kara eventually, that the shock of the reveal will pass and they’ll find their way back to the place they were in before. Kara smiles, nods, tells them they’re right, but when she recalls hands grasped tight under blankets during movies and nights with their legs accidentally tangled beneath Lena’s sheets, a cold panic rises in her chest and she cannot swallow the terror that she’s shattered the purest thing she’s ever known.

-

After 44 nights, Kara breaks.

She’s hovering above the city, waiting for the tell-tale crackle of Alex’s voice in her ear, when the top floor of Lena’s apartment building illuminates. Logically, Kara knows that Lena still lives in her apartment, that she still has needs for the lights to be on that don’t revolve around Kara, but she also knows that Lena’s got floorlamps and light fixtures and a million other ways to brighten her apartment that don’t hold the weight that this one does. It feels a bit like a lifeline and a lot like her very last chance. She’d waited for the perfect moment to tell Lena that she was Supergirl, and it had never come; she’d be a fool to make that mistake twice. If any moment begs for a confession— the _other_ confession, the one that taps gently at Kara’s soul and leaves Lena-shaped fingerprints up and down her heart— it’s this. A tightness grows in her throat, signalling the inevitability of what she knows she has to do, what she knows she has to say. There is still hope strung between the pieces of the broken thing between them, and if she lays this truth at Lena’s feet, maybe, _maybe_ , it can stitch them back together.

“I’m calling it a night,” She says abruptly into her comms piece, and it’s out of her ear and forgotten before Alex even has a chance to protest. Maybe she doesn’t have a right to this, and maybe it’s selfish to even try, but Kara’s whole being hums when she thinks of the night that she swears Lena almost kissed her, and her stomach flips thinking of the day they met and how maybe she never really had a choice in the first place.

She cuts a sharp curve across National City’s darkened horizon and poises herself for landing on Lena’s balcony, but at the last minute, thinks better of it and pulls her phone from her pocket instead.

**Kara:** I know you don’t want to hear from me, but I really need to talk to you

 **Kara:** Lena?

Kara hadn’t expected a response, but the silence stings anyway. It’s almost laughable—in a pitiful kind of way, she thinks—because what would National City think if they saw the Girl of Steel clutching at an outdated iPhone like it was the only thing that might bring her salvation? If they could hear the way her heart beats twice the speed it’s meant to, if they could see how her hands curl into loose fists with every shaky exhale, would they still think her a hero?

**Kara:** Listen I saw the light on, and I swear I just need five minutes and then I promise I won’t bother you anymore

The message sends, delivers, and then, silently, the penthouse goes dark. Lena’s message is clear, like she’s reached into Kara’s chest and carved it into the soft walls of her heart.

She floats, suspended between the city and the sky, between something that felt a lot like love and something that feels inescapably like the death of it.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr at @sapphic-luthor
> 
> \+ big thanks to @kilyun for the public callouts that forced me into finishing this (and then also for reading every version of it over and over again until i got it right)


End file.
